The experience of using an agent is going to be so much better than using a bunch of different apps and websites. That this paradigm is going to win. It's not going to win because nerds want it to win. It's not going to win because like the economy needs it to win. It's going to win because it's going to be better.
Such a good take. [laughter] It's well, it's going to win because the rest of tech sucks, as you said 20 minutes ago. [laughter] And that's something that millions and millions of people identify with. Well, speaking of the agent future here, Andrew says, not me. Hi Andrew and Ben. I'm halfway through Thursday's episode and I can't wait to listen to the rest. But you've been discussing why AI agents for consumers will be or should be a winner-take-all market. But I feel like you aren't addressing my main concern with that argument. More consumer demand doesn't make the product itself any better, and the switching costs aren't all that significant structurally. So why do you think this is a winner-take-all market? Any thoughts on that, Ben?
I don't, maybe I did say winner-take-all. I can't remember if I did, but to the extent I did, I think I was talking about aggregators and why aggregators are winner-take-all. And I guess it's implied if I say this is like the aggregator of aggregators, it is winner-take-all. Um, I think so. So Andrew is right, the dynamics are not necessarily as clear because theoretically if you can just sort of use the internet, um, you can use anything, any agent could in theory do that, etc., etc. Whereas like Google was a natural monopoly that got better and deepened its moat the more people used it. That may not happen with agents.
Well, I don't know, was Google sort of a natural monopoly? Google is just so much better. Like it's, I don't, I don't remember if you were old enough when Google came along, but there's, I don't know if there's ever been a product that has gone from zero to total domination faster and more deservedly. It was so much better than everything on the market. It was unbelievable. Like, I was a Lycos user, an Ask Jeeves user way back when.
And you probably stuck with them to be contrarian.
I did it. I did it because Google was that much better and that much cleaner a user experience.
It was so much better it overcame your contrarianism. That, that's a real testament to how good it was. Um, and I did that completely seriously. Um, you were able to look up your Cowboys scores in Washington DC on Google. That's how good it was.
Um, so, uh, so I think though the way, so, so fair pushback by Andrew, I would say number one. But number two, these markets are not static, right? If the internet stays as it is, yes, any agent can in theory browse the internet. And like I, for example, am work, like I can buy stuff on Amazon with my agent because my agent is just something coming from my house and they go there, they have no, like we talked about with our VPN VPS discussion from last week. So, um, there's the, uh, so yes, fair point. What happens in the long run though is markets reconfigure themselves. And so you saw with Muse, you're already seeing early hints of this where all these companies are like, we're partnering with Muse, we're partnering with Muse. And I guess the question is, does that mean they'll deliver a better experience? Like, so in theory, let's take the Walmart thing as an example. In theory, as long as Walmart doesn't block Muse, that's great. Muse can go use the Walmart website.
At the same time, you can imagine a situation where actually Walmart puts in real effort with Meta to deliver a super compelling experience such that it's just way faster, it's way more knowledgeable, it gets to the products really, really quickly. It has a sharing, maybe a potential sharing of information or data about the user to know like what exactly they want. You can imagine that actually the Walmart experience on Muse becomes massively better over time because Walmart is investing resources to make the experience better.
Yeah, that's what happens in aggregation markets. Is the, we think about because we're talking about aggregation today mostly after 15 years of this happening or 20 years of this happening where the suppliers are like, I hate the aggregator, this sucks. The reason why they're in that position is because being a supplier for an aggregator is good business.
